All You Need to Know About Social Customers

Introduction

The dawn of the digital age and the explosive growth of social media has evolved the buying cycle. With it came the rise of a new customer—one that has been known to shake up even the most respected brands. Today, we know this new entity of business as none other than the “Social Customer.”

The Social Customer is every man, woman and child that is an active participant of social media – roughly 1.4 billion people. The voice of the Social Customer has proved to be so powerful that it has created PR and social media mayhem for companies ranging in size from the pizza giant, Papa John’s to a small restaurant in Arizona. In this day and age, every customer has a voice. Even the largest organizations are quickly realizing the undeniable authority of today's Social Customer.

5 Reasons Why the Social Customer is today’s Undeniable Authority:

1. The Social Customer Listens to their Peers – Not the Companies

If you’re a business owner, today’s online forums and review sites may be perceived as a curse and a blessing. These are huge destinations for Social Customers considering over 1.1 million reviews have been posted on Yelp. For successful businesses, a four or five star rating on a review site such as Yelp or TripAdvisor is just as powerful as any marketing or advertising campaign. The issue here is that these reviews are completely out of the hands of business owners – they need to constantly be mindful of serving the needs of every, single one of their customers. To put this in a better perspective, more than 88% of consumers are influenced by other consumers’ online comments (Source). The weight of the Social Customer has grown drastically, as their word has become the new trusted voice.

2. Unhappy Customers Tell Their Friends, Who Tell Their Friends

Jeff Bezos may have put it best when he famously said: “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000.” Due to the rise of social media, today’s Social Customer has become more connected to their peers than ever before. Companies have quickly realized that no customer experience is safe from going unheard.  Especially since on average, one Social Customer will tell 42 other people about an experience they have had with a company (Source).

Do you still believe a customer service complaint goes unnoticed on social media? More than one million people view Tweets about customer service every week. Unfortunately, roughly 80% of these Tweets are critical or negative by nature (Source). You can count on it that potential prospects are more likely to pay attention to a current customer’s tweet rather than an enticing offer from the brand.

3. If You Ignore the Social Customer, They’re Not Buying

Here’s a startling fact: 88% of consumers are less likely to buy from companies that ignore complaints and questions on social media (Source).  A huge component of social media is built upon the fact that it is an open display of trust between a business and their customer. If a company fails to respond to a question on social media, to many people, this is a breach of trust – the company doesn’t care about their customers’ problems. 

Thanks to the Internet, customers now have the ability to access and research more products and services than ever before. Essentially, they have more choices. A simple lack of attention to a customer service complaint or question is all it takes for the Social Customer to move on to their next option.

4. Companies Are Adjusting to the Social Customer’s Expectations

In today’s age of constant connectivity and instant solutions, the Social Customer demands immediate assistance at any hour of the day. So what are the Social Customer’s expectations of a company responding to their inquiries? According to the 2,000-person poll from Parature, 83% of Twitter users and 71% of Facebook users expect a customer service response from a brand within a day (Source). These expectations may be viewed as extremely demanding – especially outside of office hours or during peak seasons. However, many smart companies are scrambling to make the necessary adjustments to provide for these expectations!

5. Companies That Actively Engage with the Social Customer See Better Results

The Social Customer is no longer limited to support phone lines or emails. Today, they have the ability to make their customer support problems public thanks to social media. In fact, 47% of U.S. social media users now actively seek customer service through social media (Source), and for the organizations that deliver, they are seeing positive results from their efforts. Customers who receive a quick and effective response are 71% more likely to recommend the brand.  Smart brands fully understand the authority of the Social Customer and use it to their advantage by engaging them and providing exceptional customer service. This increases brand loyalty, brand advocacy and ultimately, produces positive results. To drive this point home, loyal customers that engage with companies over social media spend 20% to 40% more money with those companies than other customers (Source). Failure to engage the Social Customer results in less positive outcomes.

Why Social Media is Important Customer Service Channel?

What is social care?

The rapidly evolving shift in how we communicate and connect with each other requires companies to rethink how they interact with customers. Social customer service is rapidly becoming the new, critical channel to drive satisfaction and loyalty. Our colleagues from TELUS International call this activity “social care” and it’s defined as the efforts employees make through social media to care for customers. Social media

Organizations are at different stages of maturity of their social care programs. Some are only listening to customers via social media using “voice of the customer” information to improve marketing, products and support. Others are regularly engaging with customers and realizing positive outcomes including reduced contacts into other support channels.

An opportunity not to be missed

A tremendous new customer service opportunity has emerged with the adoption of social media by consumers and the ability for companies to effectively listen to and track conversations about their brands. Interestingly, these efforts aren’t necessarily confined to traditional contact center agents working in customer service departments. We’re finding some companies empowering not only their well-trained customer service reps, but also a select group of engineers, product managers and even executives. Tapping into the larger talent pool is one of many strategies companies are using to provide positive customer experiences on the social web.

What are the benefits of social care?

Social media is opening a back door into customer service, forcing companies to formalize their approach to social care. If customer support is done right, it can generate more positive sentiment than overall brand sentiment.

Well-executed social care can actually raise the social brand perception for the entire company. This isn’t a surprise when you consider that customer service is a major consumer touch point and, therefore, a driver of overall brand sentiment and a contributor to brand equity.

Social care is different from traditional voice, email and chat support because social care conversations are public, often permanent and can easily go viral. When people talk about a brand, it’s often about product-related issues or negative customer service experiences. Companies recognize they need to engage customers in social media, but the typical approach is to build a “social team” of marketers and PR managers. While professionals in these disciplines can effectively communicate corporate messages, they aren’t typically equipped with the tools or experience to solve customer problems. Gartner predicts that at least 35% of customer service centers will integrate some form of community/social capabilities by 2013.

“In 2010, only 5 percent of organizations took advantage of social/collaborative customer action to improve service processes; however, customer demand and heightened business awareness is making this a top issue among customer service managers. At current trajectories, within five years we expect that community peer-to-peer support projects will supplement or replace Tier 1 contact center support in more than 40 percent of top 1,000 companies with a contact center.” said Mr. Kraus from Gartner.

Providing a good customer experience is more important today than ever before, as positive and negative word-of-mouth spreads quickly on the social web. Companies need to actively shape the conversation by engaging customers before and after purchases.

Advantages of Social Media for Business

1. Gain valuable customer insights

Social media generates a huge amount of data about your customers in real time. Every day there are over 500 million Tweets, 4.5 billion Likes on Facebook, and 95 million photos and videos uploaded to Instagram. Behind these staggering numbers is a wealth of information about your customers—who they are, what they like, and how they feel about your brand.

Through daily active engagement and social listening, you can gather relevant customer data and use that information to make smarter business decisions. With Hootsuite Insights, for example, you can gather information across all your social networks in real time—allowing you to gauge customer sentiment, find the conversations happening around your brand, and run real-time reports.

 

2. Increase brand awareness and loyalty

When you have a presence on social media, you make it easier for your customers to find and connect with you. And by connecting with your customers on social, you’re more likely to increase customer retention and brand loyalty. A study by The Social Habit shows that 53 percent of Americans who follow brands on social are more loyal to those brands.

 

3. Run targeted ads with real-time results

Social ads are an inexpensive way to promote your business and distribute content. They also offer powerful targeting options so that you can reach the right audience. For example, if you run an ad campaign on LinkedIn, you can segment by things like location, company, job title, gender, and age—the list goes on. If you’re running a Facebook ad, you can target based on location, demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections. You can track and measure the performance of your social ads in real time.

 

4. Generate higher converting leads

Social media increases sales and customer retention through regular interaction and timely customer service. In the 2015 Sales Best Practices Study from research institute MHI Global, world-class companies rated social media as the most effective way to identify key decision makers and new business opportunities. In the State of Social Selling in 2015, nearly 75 percent of companies that engaged in selling on social media reported an increase in sales in 12 months.

 

5. Provide rich customer experiences

Even if you aren’t on social media, most of your customers expect you to be. Over 67 percent of consumers now go to social media for customer service. They expect fast response times and 24/7 support—and companies that deliver win out. A study by Aberdeen Group shows that companies engaging in social customer service see much bigger annual financial gains (7.5 percent YOY growth) vs. those without (2.9 percent).

6. Increase website traffic and search ranking

One of the biggest benefits of social media for business is using it to increase your website traffic. Not only does social media help you direct people to your website, but the more social media shares you receive, the higher your search ranking will be. For example, if every person who follows Hootsuite on Twitter Retweets this post, it’s more likely to rank higher in Google’s search engine results page for variations of “social media for business.”

 

7. Find out what your competitors are doing

With social media monitoring you can gain key information about your competitors. This kind of intel will allow you to make strategic business decisions to stay ahead of them. For example, you can create search streams in Hootsuite to monitor industry keywords and mentions of your competitors’ names and products. Based on your search results, you can improve your business to offer product enhancements, service, or content that they may be missing.

 

8. Share content faster and easier

In the past, marketers faced the challenge of ensuring their content reached customers in the shortest possible time. With the help of social media, specifically when it comes to sharing content about your business or for content curation, all you need to do is share it on your brand’s social network accounts.

 

9. Geotarget content

Geo-targeting is an effective way to send your message out to a specific audience based on their location. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have tools that allow you to communicate the right kind of content to your audience. For example, in Hootsuite you can target Twitter messages to followers in specific countries, or send messages from Facebook and LinkedIn company pages to specific groups based on geographical and demographic parameters.  You can also use Hootsuite geotargeting to find conversations relevant to your brand.

 

10. Build relationships

Social media isn’t about blasting your company’s sales pitch on social, it’s a two-way channel where you have the opportunity to enrich relationships with your customers. For example, social media allows tourism brands to create dialogue with travellers, therefore creating relationships with customers before, during, and after they have booked a trip with the company. This kind of social media dialogue between brands and customers is something traditional advertising cannot achieve.

The Disadvantages of Using Social Networks as Marketing Tools

Marketers are faced with an array of new choices with the rapid increase in the use of social media. According to a social media study by Monash University, American businesses are expected to spend more than $3.1 billion by 2014 for social media marketing. The main disadvantage of using social networks as marketing tools is the time required to navigate and manage the intricacies of each medium. Social media networks come in different forms and settings and each requires its own distinctive approach to engagement and individualization.

 

Social Networking is Time Intensive

As the name implies, social media is interactive, and successful, two-way exchanges take commitment. The nature of marketing changes in social networks, with the focus placed on establishing long-term relationships that can turn into more sales. Somebody has to be responsible to monitor each network, respond to comments, answer questions and post product information the customer deems valuable. Businesses without a service to manage these social networks will find it difficult to compete.

 

Social Marketing Seen as Intrusive

Some avid social network members feel that marketing and advertising is intrusive to their privacy. According to Web Pro News, eight out of 10 social media users feel ambivalent to uneasy about sharing personal information and place social networks low in security confidence. The practice of shaping ads and campaigns off member information collected from social networking sites has stirred a wave confidentiality controversy, and marketing efforts can be met with bitterness and offensive reactions.

 

Lack of Feedback Control

One aspect of social networking that is especially damaging to marketing campaigns is negative post responses. Unhappy customers or industry competitors are able to post disparaging or offensive pictures, posts or videos and there is not much a marketer can do to prevent these occurrences. Still, negative or other non-constructive feedback cannot be ignored. Social networks must be managed efficiently enough to immediately respond and neutralize harmful posts, which takes more time.

Local Businesses and Distant Fans

Most social networks are free to join and operate, but without paid advertising to firmly target their customer base, local businesses often end up with followers who are not local. The best use of marketing through social networking sites is to collect information from customers regarding their interests and motivations for repeat business. Social marketing can fall flat when customers and clients are not around to frequent local businesses and accurately provide data through using the service. To some extent, e-commerce options can optimize this disadvantage by offering online products or services.

Mainly Attracts Current Brand Users

Another potential downside to social network marketing is that it easily attracts current loyal customers, but much more effort is required to attain new business. Of course, this is excellent to rouse existing patrons into making repeated purchases. According to Northern Illinois University, loyal brand users can also be actively channeled into peer-to-peer marketing through the social networks. Current patrons can influence new consumers to try services and products. The marketing balancing act is to avoid pure advertising that social consumers detest and create relationship bonds.